Nonfiction.

Watching The Wordwatchers

May 15, 1994|By Reviewed by Philip Brantingham, a writer and editor.

The Language Instinct

By Steven Pinker

Morrow, 494 pages, $23

No modern thinker was more concerned with language and the meaning of words than the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. To some degree his concern led him to be wary about how language was used, and he once wrote: "Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language."

Steven Pinker, author of "The Language Instinct," gives Wittgenstein only a single mention in his book, perhaps for good reason. Director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at MIT, Pinker is not suspicious of what language will do to our thinking but rejoices in what he calls "one of the wonders of the natural world." He also rejoices in the fact that language is now submitting to "that uniquely satisfying kind of understanding that we call science." In other words, it's being submitted to what academics call "research."

Pinker's basic goal in "The Language Instinct" is to elucidate the findings of the new academic field called "cognitive science." Like influential linguist Noam Chomsky, whom he frequently and reverently cites, Pinker believes that there is an innate instinct in humans to "learn, speak, and understand language," and he wants us to know that "for the first time in history" experts are examining this aspect of human behavior.

Pinker's first problem is that while he says that he wants to appeal to a general audience, cognitive science is, as its clunky nomenclature tells us, arcane. The reader of this book is fed such indigestible terms as "sentence perception module" and "lexical decision reaction time" and is informed that "grammar is a discrete combinatorial system."

But, in fact, "The Language Instinct" is not really aimed at the general reader. Instead, it is a technical report from the Cognitive Science Front, laced with quite a few slaps on the wrist for those whom Pinker contemptuously calls "language mavens."

Such persons muddy the pure waters that flow from the spring of cognitive science by declaring some language usages wrong, vulgar, awkward, etc., and by suggesting that language is constantly being misused and manipulated. To Pinker, in his euphoria over language, such "prescriptive" rules are clearly not in the interests of science.

Cognitive scientists prefer to "describe" not "prescribe." And if mavens like William Safire and Theodore Bernstein persist in making "Solomonic" judgments, Pinker will have nothing to do with them. In a proletarian touch, he defers to the rightness of the "man on the street" to know what is best and how to speak.

In this part of "The Language Instinct," and elsewhere as well, the tone is clearly defensive. And a kind of "us against them" attitude is not unusual among Chomskyites, whose claims of late have not had easy sledding among other academic linguistic scientists. Thus Pinker's assertion that "for the first time in history" the world is really learning the truth about language and instinct has an ingenuous air.

As Safire has written, nonprescribers like Pinker are far from being neutral scientists but are themselves engaged in the "politics of language," prescribing their own quite rigid views. As for the language mavens, it is Safire's view that they "introduce a note of good sense and good grace, of interested disinterest...."

But as far as Pinker is concerned, such matters may be beside the point. His are not gentle comments on language and its uses but Hegelian beliefs in the One, the absolute truth that is about to be revealed (if it hasn't already been done so by Chomsky). Pinker deeply believes in "the single mental design" that underlies all the apparent Babel or the world's languages. He believes in "grammar genes" and in the unshakable rightness of Everyman's world of language (and fie on the prescribers).

Those who study aspects of human activity today seem to fall into two schools: the independent observers (language mavens?) and the self-styled experts (cognitive scientists?). In drawing a kind of battle line between the two, Pinker tries to turn a common interest into a battle for territory. And this is a pity, for the author certainly has worked hard and searched far afield to show the various aspects of language use.

But, then, Pinker's own language is often that of the technician ("adapted computational modules"), and he often falls into that rationalist mode in which, to quote Isaiah Berlin, "all ultimate questions are reduced to technical problems, soluble by appropriate techniques." The truth is: Language is much too interesting-and too much fun-to be left to the technicians.